Norman O. Brown
Encyclopedia
Norman Oliver Brown was an American classicist.
mining engineer. His mother was a Cuba
n of Alsatian
and Cuban
origin. He was educated at Clifton College
, then Balliol College, Oxford
(B.A., M.A., Greats; his tutor was Isaiah Berlin
) and the University of Wisconsin–Madison
(Ph.D., Classics).
In 1938, Brown married Elizabeth Potter. During World War II, he worked for the Office of Strategic Services
as a specialist on French culture
. His supervisor was Carl Schorske, and his colleagues included Herbert Marcuse
and Franz Neumann
. His other friends included the historians Christopher Hill and Hayden White
as well as the philosopher Stuart Hampshire
. At Wesleyan University
, he befriended the composer John Cage
, an association that proved fruitful to both. Brown became a professor of classics
at Wesleyan. During Brown's tenure there, Schorske became a professor of history and the two engaged in a mutually beneficial interdisciplinary discourse.
's Theogony and his first monograph, Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth, showed a Marxist
tendency. Brown supported Henry A. Wallace
's Progressive Party
candidacy for president in 1948. Following Brown's disenchantment with politics in the wake of the 1948 presidential election, he studied the works of Sigmund Freud
. This culminated in his classic 1959 work, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History
. The book's fame grew when Norman Podhoretz
recommended it to Lionel Trilling
.
Love's Body, published in 1966, examined "the role of erotic love in human history, describing a struggle between eroticism and civilization." The book was criticized by Herbert Marcuse
in "Love Mystified: A Critique of Norman O. Brown", an article published in February 1967 in Commentary
. Brown's "A Reply to Herbert Marcuse" was published by Commentary in March 1967.
In the late 1960s, following a stay at the University of Rochester
, Brown moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz
, as professor of humanities, teaching in the Boards of Studies in History of Consciousness and Literature. He was a highly popular professor, known to friends and students alike as "Nobby". The range of courses he taught, while broadly focused around the themes of poetics, mythology, and psychoanalysis, included classes on Finnegans Wake
, Islam
, and, with Carl Schorske, Goethe's Faust
.
Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis, published in 1991, was an anthology that collected many of Brown's later writings. It contained "Dionysus in 1990", an article in which Brown used the work of Georges Bataille
, whom he described as a "fellow traveler on the Dionysian path", to develop a post-Marxist critique of political economy.
In The Challenge of Islam, a collection of lectures given in 1981 and published in 2009, Brown argues that Islam
challenges us to make life a work of art. Drawing on Henri Corbin’s The Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, he argues that "Muhammad is the bridge between Christ
and Dante
and Blake
.”
and Sam Keen
for Psychology Today
. Bennis asked him whether he lived out the vision of polymorphous perversity
in his books. He replied, "....I perceive a necessary gap between seeing and being. I would not be able to have said certain things if I had been under the obligation to unify the word and the deed. As it is I can let my words reach out and net impossible things - things that are impossible for me to do. And this is a way of paying the price for saying or seeing things. You will remember that I discovered these things as a late learner. Polymorphous perversity in the literal, physical sense is not the real issue. I don't like the suggestion that polymorphous perversity of the imagination is somehow second-best to literal polymorphous perversity."
Life
Brown's father was an Anglo-IrishAnglo-Irish
Anglo-Irish was a term used primarily in the 19th and early 20th centuries to identify a privileged social class in Ireland, whose members were the descendants and successors of the Protestant Ascendancy, mostly belonging to the Church of Ireland, which was the established church of Ireland until...
mining engineer. His mother was a Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
n of Alsatian
Alsace
Alsace is the fifth-smallest of the 27 regions of France in land area , and the smallest in metropolitan France. It is also the seventh-most densely populated region in France and third most densely populated region in metropolitan France, with ca. 220 inhabitants per km²...
and Cuban
Cubans
Cubans or Cuban people are the inhabitants or citizens of Cuba. Cuba is a multi-ethnic nation, home to people of different ethnic and national backgrounds...
origin. He was educated at Clifton College
Clifton College
Clifton College is a co-educational independent school in Clifton, Bristol, England, founded in 1862. In its early years it was notable for emphasising science in the curriculum, and for being less concerned with social elitism, e.g. by admitting day-boys on equal terms and providing a dedicated...
, then Balliol College, Oxford
Balliol College, Oxford
Balliol College , founded in 1263, is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England but founded by a family with strong Scottish connections....
(B.A., M.A., Greats; his tutor was Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin
Sir Isaiah Berlin OM, FBA was a British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas of Russian-Jewish origin, regarded as one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century and a dominant liberal scholar of his generation...
) and the University of Wisconsin–Madison
University of Wisconsin–Madison
The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1848, UW–Madison is the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System. It became a land-grant institution in 1866...
(Ph.D., Classics).
In 1938, Brown married Elizabeth Potter. During World War II, he worked for the Office of Strategic Services
Office of Strategic Services
The Office of Strategic Services was a United States intelligence agency formed during World War II. It was the wartime intelligence agency, and it was a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency...
as a specialist on French culture
Culture of France
The culture of France and of the French people has been shaped by geography, by profound historical events, and by foreign and internal forces and groups. France, and in particular Paris, has played an important role as a center of high culture and of decorative arts since the seventeenth...
. His supervisor was Carl Schorske, and his colleagues included Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse was a German Jewish philosopher, sociologist and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory...
and Franz Neumann
Franz Leopold Neumann
Franz Leopold Neumann was a German-Jewish left-wing political activist, Marxist theorist and labor lawyer, who became a political scientist in exile and is best known for his theoretical analyses of National Socialism. He studied in Germany and the United Kingdom, and spent the last phase of...
. His other friends included the historians Christopher Hill and Hayden White
Hayden White
Hayden White is a historian in the tradition of literary criticism, perhaps most famous for his work Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe...
as well as the philosopher Stuart Hampshire
Stuart Hampshire
Sir Stuart Newton Hampshire was an Oxford University philosopher, literary critic and university administrator. He was one of the antirationalist Oxford thinkers who gave a new direction to moral and political thought in the post-World War II era.Hampshire was educated at Repton School and at...
. At Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college founded in 1831 and located in Middletown, Connecticut. According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Wesleyan is the only Baccalaureate College in the nation that emphasizes undergraduate instruction in the arts and...
, he befriended the composer John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
, an association that proved fruitful to both. Brown became a professor of classics
Classics
Classics is the branch of the Humanities comprising the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and other culture of the ancient Mediterranean world ; especially Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome during Classical Antiquity Classics (sometimes encompassing Classical Studies or...
at Wesleyan. During Brown's tenure there, Schorske became a professor of history and the two engaged in a mutually beneficial interdisciplinary discourse.
Works
Brown's commentary on HesiodHesiod
Hesiod was a Greek oral poet generally thought by scholars to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. His is the first European poetry in which the poet regards himself as a topic, an individual with a distinctive role to play. Ancient authors credited him and...
's Theogony and his first monograph, Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth, showed a Marxist
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
tendency. Brown supported Henry A. Wallace
Henry A. Wallace
Henry Agard Wallace was the 33rd Vice President of the United States , the Secretary of Agriculture , and the Secretary of Commerce . In the 1948 presidential election, Wallace was the nominee of the Progressive Party.-Early life:Henry A...
's Progressive Party
Progressive Party (United States, 1948)
The United States Progressive Party of 1948 was a left-wing political party that ran former Vice President Henry A. Wallace of Iowa for president and U.S. Senator Glen H. Taylor of Idaho for vice president in 1948.-Foundation:...
candidacy for president in 1948. Following Brown's disenchantment with politics in the wake of the 1948 presidential election, he studied the works of Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
. This culminated in his classic 1959 work, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History
Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History
Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History is a work by Norman O. Brown, first published in 1959. A radical analysis and critique of the work of Sigmund Freud, it has been compared to works by Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault , as well as to Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther and...
. The book's fame grew when Norman Podhoretz
Norman Podhoretz
Norman B. Podhoretz is an American neoconservative pundit and writer for Commentary magazine.-Early life:The son of Julius and Helen Podhoretz, Jewish immigrants from the Central European region of Galicia, Podhoretz was born and raised in Brownsville, Brooklyn...
recommended it to Lionel Trilling
Lionel Trilling
Lionel Trilling was an American literary critic, author, and teacher. With wife Diana Trilling, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review. Although he did not establish a school of literary criticism, he is one of the leading U.S...
.
Love's Body, published in 1966, examined "the role of erotic love in human history, describing a struggle between eroticism and civilization." The book was criticized by Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse was a German Jewish philosopher, sociologist and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory...
in "Love Mystified: A Critique of Norman O. Brown", an article published in February 1967 in Commentary
Commentary (magazine)
Commentary is a monthly American magazine on politics, Judaism, social and cultural issues. It was founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945. By 1960 its editor was Norman Podhoretz, a liberal at the time who moved sharply to the right in the 1970s and 1980s becoming a strong voice for the...
. Brown's "A Reply to Herbert Marcuse" was published by Commentary in March 1967.
In the late 1960s, following a stay at the University of Rochester
University of Rochester
The University of Rochester is a private, nonsectarian, research university in Rochester, New York, United States. The university grants undergraduate and graduate degrees, including doctoral and professional degrees. The university has six schools and various interdisciplinary programs.The...
, Brown moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz
University of California, Santa Cruz
The University of California, Santa Cruz, also known as UC Santa Cruz or UCSC, is a public, collegiate university; one of ten campuses in the University of California...
, as professor of humanities, teaching in the Boards of Studies in History of Consciousness and Literature. He was a highly popular professor, known to friends and students alike as "Nobby". The range of courses he taught, while broadly focused around the themes of poetics, mythology, and psychoanalysis, included classes on Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish author James Joyce, significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's...
, Islam
Islam
Islam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...
, and, with Carl Schorske, Goethe's Faust
Faust
Faust is the protagonist of a classic German legend; a highly successful scholar, but also dissatisfied with his life, and so makes a deal with the devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. Faust's tale is the basis for many literary, artistic, cinematic, and musical...
.
Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis, published in 1991, was an anthology that collected many of Brown's later writings. It contained "Dionysus in 1990", an article in which Brown used the work of Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille was a French writer. His multifaceted work is linked to the domains of literature, anthropology, philosophy, economy, sociology and history of art...
, whom he described as a "fellow traveler on the Dionysian path", to develop a post-Marxist critique of political economy.
In The Challenge of Islam, a collection of lectures given in 1981 and published in 2009, Brown argues that Islam
Islam
Islam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...
challenges us to make life a work of art. Drawing on Henri Corbin’s The Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, he argues that "Muhammad is the bridge between Christ
Christ
Christ is the English term for the Greek meaning "the anointed one". It is a translation of the Hebrew , usually transliterated into English as Messiah or Mashiach...
and Dante
DANTE
Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe is a not-for-profit organisation that plans, builds and operates the international networks that interconnect the various national research and education networks in Europe and surrounding regions...
and Blake
Blake
Blake is a surname or a given name which originated from Old English. Its derivation is uncertain; it could come from "blac", a nickname for someone who had dark hair or skin, or from "blaac", a nickname for someone with pale hair or skin. Another theory is that it is a corruption of "Ap Lake",...
.”
Personal life
In 1970, Brown was interviewed by Warren BennisWarren Bennis
Warren Gamaliel Bennis is an American scholar, organizational consultant and author, widely regarded as a pioneer of the contemporary field of Leadership studies....
and Sam Keen
Sam Keen
Sam Keen is a noted American author, professor and philosopher who is best known for his exploration of questions regarding love, life, religion, and being a man in contemporary society...
for Psychology Today
Psychology Today
Psychology Today is a bi-monthly magazine published in the United States. It is a psychology-based magazine about relationships, health, and related topics written for a mass audience of non-psychologists. Psychology Today was founded in 1967 and features articles on such topics as love,...
. Bennis asked him whether he lived out the vision of polymorphous perversity
Polymorphous perversity
Polymorphous perversity is a psychoanalytic term for human ability to gain sexual gratification outside socially normative sexual behaviors. Sigmund Freud used this term to describe the normal sexual disposition of humans from infancy to about age five....
in his books. He replied, "....I perceive a necessary gap between seeing and being. I would not be able to have said certain things if I had been under the obligation to unify the word and the deed. As it is I can let my words reach out and net impossible things - things that are impossible for me to do. And this is a way of paying the price for saying or seeing things. You will remember that I discovered these things as a late learner. Polymorphous perversity in the literal, physical sense is not the real issue. I don't like the suggestion that polymorphous perversity of the imagination is somehow second-best to literal polymorphous perversity."
Books
- 1947. Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
- 1953. Hesiod, Theogony. Translated and with an introduction by Norman O. Brown. Indianapolis : Bobbs-Merrill.
- 1959. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. Middletown: Wesleyan University PressWesleyan University PressWesleyan University Press is a university press that is part of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. The Press is currently directed by Suzanna Tamminen, a published poet and essayist...
. - 1966. Love's Body. New York: Random House.
- 1973. Closing Time. New York: Random House.
- 1991. Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Secondary literature
- In Memoriam: Norman O. Brown, ed. by Jerome Neu, New Pacific Press, 2007
- David Greenham, The Resurrection of the Body: The Work of Norman O. Brown, Lexington Books, 2006
- Dale Pendell, Walking with Nobby: Conversations with Norman O. Brown, Mercury House, 2008
- The Challenge of Islam—The Prophetic Tradition: Lectures 1981, ed. by Jerome Neu, New Pacific Press, 2009